The Futurist Manifesto at 100

PHUTATORIUS
100 years ago today Le Figaro published F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. Here's a full English translation. But we'll cover some of the wilder bits here:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

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Immediately here we see the difference between French and American newspapers. Just you try and submit something like this to the Wall Street Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, or Camden Courier-Post. This doesn't fly Stateside — not even in 1909. Oh, today's rags publish their fair share of "demented writing" that tests the "limits of logic" — but you have to earn that privilege first as a staff columnist.

"Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!"

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself — vlan! — head over heels in a ditch.

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

Cliff's Notes: Rich kid gets hammered, runs his car off the road, tells bystanders "I meant to do that."

(1) We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
(2) The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
(3) Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
(4) We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
(5) We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
(6) The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
(7) Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
(8) We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
(9) We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
(10) We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
(11) We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

These are the 11 canons/commandments of Futurism. Let's report back to Maronetti on how all this is working out, a century later:

*The 20th century was surely the Century of the Automobile. We've made good on this, F.T.: we've come up with hot rods, Interstates, NASCAR, Hunter S. Thompson. There have been stumbles: we briefly flirted with the idea of trading our big, angry engines for bumper-car electrics, but all that's by the wayside now. Gas prices are down to two bucks a gallon. The car companies are on life-support, but we think they'll pull through. What — are we all gonna ride bikes?

*I think we struck out with literature. There's just one book now. It's about a young, liberated professional woman and her urban odyssey toward self-actualization and true love. Well, there's that and all the Jesus/ Armageddon books. You might like the Jesus/ Armageddon books, but you have to go to a special store (Wal-Mart) to get them.

*Our museums and libraries are still standing. That's the bad news. The good news is we have the Internet, and the sheer volume of its published content overwhelms all the dusty old books gathered in hard-copy archives. And I hear that most web sites turn over completely in less than three months. Out with the old! Go forth, TiVo, and delete this two-week-old recording of Grey's Anatomy from my hard drive. In fact, delete all of 'em.

*Lethal, beautiful ideas had their time in the sun, thanks to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Whoopee. Hooray. War, militarism, patriotism, contempt for woman — we pretty much locked down (9) for you. The anarchists petered out, but then again, they were never all that well-organized.

*Re (11): wow! Quite a lot to cover there. These days great crowds are agitated because they're not working. We're trading carbon credits now, so smoke tendrils are a bit passé. Steamers are long gone, unless you're ordering mussels. We still have trains, but Mithridates will tell you that they're limping along languidly, with the occasional kick in the backside from a government subsidy. We did just earmark three quarters of a trillion dollars for a lot of this stuff. Oh, we'll have bridges, Signore, bridges spanning the great yawning chasm of this stolid, stupefied Economy. Great, graceful arcing bridges to Prosperity. And bridge loans for banks. Harrumph.

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

And it was in Italy that Futurism found an evil twin — or punk cousin — in Mussolini's Fascism. Did some corruption of meaning happen in the retranslation back from French? Hey, everybody — let's drain the swamps, get those trains running on time, and invade Ethiopia! Let's get wrecked and drive the country into a ditch!

The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

It ought to be clear from all this that F.T. Marinetti was declaring a permanent state of rock 'n' roll. Noise, speed, reckless youth, generational warfare. Shoot, the rock tradition (in its purest form, anyway) even calls for "contempt for woman." What's the difference, really, between Marinetti and Jim Morrison, other than that Marinetti was actually a poet?

I don't think I like this 40-year cutoff point for relevance. Urk. This Frustrated Writer has only five years left before his useless manuscripts (their words, not mine) would hit the Waste Paper Basket. And what does this mean for rock music, now that I've raised this issue? Yeah, so maybe I enjoyed the "light cadence" of the first Killers album, but I'm damned if I let those poseurs push aside the Old Masters.

And Signore, you're pushing one hundred and forty. Would a true Futurist be pleased that his work has been assigned a library call number, that he's been stuffed away in the proverbial climate-controlled storage facility, to be released only for the occasional time capsule-style review in a blog post?

I'll leave you to think this through, Signore, but I enjoyed the exercise.

The House GOP: Rhetoric and Realpolitik

PHUTATORIUS
We've had two votes in the House on the stimulus now, and not one GOP rep has broken rank to support the bill. Cue rhetoric from the Democrats about obstructionism and partisan politicking in a time of crisis. That rhetoric has its appeal, but can we really blame the Republicans? The writing was on the wall, after all: this bill was going to pass.
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If your vote isn't actually going to have an effect on the outcome, it's not unreasonable (I don't think) to vote your self-interest, and Realpolitik says GOP representatives should vote no. That way, if the stimulus fails to stimulate, the GOP can sing the "We Told You So" song. If it provides the expected modest boost to the economy, the House Republicans can hammer home what they'd have done to make it better. And even if the stimulus proves to be a Just What We Needed Cure-All — and the percentages point against this possibility — it won't be the worst thing in the world to have opposed it. The electorate doesn't always preoccupy itself with who was on the wrong side of a question that proves to be one-sided in retrospect: consider the case of isolationist Republicans who wanted no part of World War II.

(And given this electorate, which self-sorting and crafty gerrymandering has calcified into party-identifiable districts, it's typically the case that an in-party primary battle poses more of a threat to a rep's reelection prospects than the November vote. This gives a Republican every incentive to look more Republican, if he wants to hold his seat. So they embrace the tax-cut ideology, even if "we all [ought to be] Keynesians now.")

It's no coincidence that the GOPers were so stridently opposed to the stimulus bill in the House, and that they held the line so staunchly — whereas Senate Republicans worked within the system, labored to improve the bill, proposed amendments, and mustered three moderate GOP ayes to reach the 60 votes required of a deficit spending measure. The Republicans can only be obstructionist up to the point of actual obstruction. The party couldn't gamble on the bill not passing — and in the end, they didn't. I see that it's fashionable these days for the right-wing bloggers to excoriate Senators Collins, Snowe, and Specter: but of course it's these three Senators who have empowered the party ideologues to carp and criticize without actually having to answer for their opinions. The far better play here for Republicans is to take a dive and appear to go down fighting.

It would be interesting to know how our esteemed Congressmen would vote if we created a situation in which they couldn't know the ideological composition of the two houses and had no clue in advance where any of their colleagues stood on the legislation — say, if we locked each of them up in a storage facility cubicle (climate-controlled, of course) with nothing inside but a flashlight and a copy of the bill. Blinded as to self-interest, these 535 could well be in a position to vote their consciences, for once.

How do you suppose it would shake out? Would these GOPers still be convinced that we're better positioned to inject cash into the economy in the short term by giving it to people who are terrified of losing their jobs, their homes, their health insurance right now? Do they truly believe it's a better investment in the economy if the stimulus money is ultimately spent on Big Mouth Billy Bass, Tickle Me Elmo, and other novelty baubles, rather than on roads, high-speed rail, broadband, medical records digitization, weatherization, and other infrastructure? I'm guessing they wouldn't, but that's all water under the corroded bridge. House Republicans voted no on Friday because they could. So hooray for them — and hooray for the three Senate "traitors" who enabled them to do it.

Great (and Lame) Moments in Music Video; Some Thoughts on Duran Duran

PHUTATORIUS
Thank you, VH1 Classic — and you, too, TiVo, for the time-shifting — for serving up All-Time Top Ten's Duran Duran episode two nights ago. This is the province of the 35-year-old father of two: he's home on a Saturday night in front of the TV, and if he's lucky, he's found some nostalgia channel through which he might relive his youth. Shoot — VH1 has even arranged for the release of Original Six Veejay Mark Goodman from his climate-controlled storage facility to host the show.

And so, Duran Duran. My sister and I talked on the phone while I watched this — she was supporting "Hungry like the Wolf" for the #1 spot, whereas I favored "Rio." "Rio" won, but I'm not one for point-scoring. VH1 served up some terrific Double Duran nostalgia on the way up the ladder to The Song I Picked and My Sister Didn't. Some highlights:
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*Though it never occurred to me at the time, the video for "Wild Boys" was obviously a Road Warrior ripoff — they even dressed Simon LeBon up as Mad Max. That said, this one was clearly a costly, complicated undertaking, and I think the bit where Simon LeBon is strapped to the windmill that periodically turns him underwater, then past an open flame, has to qualify as a Great Music Video Moment.

*Likewise in "Hungry like the Wolf," when LeBon stands up in the café and throws the table over. "They show it twice," My HLTW-loving sister recalled to me over the phone, without the benefit of the programming in front of her. "It's so good they show it twice." Another Moment, surely. I remember a Saturday morning in Columbus, just before a Buckeyes game, when a friend of mine ended a heated game of euchre by throwing the kitchen table over. This might have started a fight, had he not rationalized away his rash action by declaring it was something he'd always wanted to do, since he saw it in "Hungry like the Wolf." This was an acceptable excuse. Some of us even admired the guy for it.

But the winner here is "Rio," and so it's the one we'll embed in the post.



"Rio" probably best captures what is so "on one hand/on the other" maddening about Duran Duran. Consider the head-on shot of the band on the yacht at 1:04. Few segments of music video are as simple and iconic. A shame, then, that this footage had to follow on the heels of that godawful bit where a crab clamps its claw down on one Duraner's toe.

In the end, I don't know what to make of Duran Duran. So many of these once-laughingstock early 80s bands have been rehabilitated in recent years. Indeed, some — like Bow Wow Wow — I will fight to the death to defend. Others simply retained their cool, perhaps because they weren't 100% made and destroyed by music video — they had street cred, and they only used MTV to take that last, awkward step into living rooms in the Midwest. Not so Duran Duran: video didn't supplement the band's career — it was an integral part of it. And maybe this is why I haven't made a priority of listening to them, even as I've gone through Adam Ant phases and Psych Furs phases and God knows what else: just listening to Duran Duran doesn't give you the complete picture.

It doesn't help that MTV itself has gone into the shitter over the past fifteen years. If you're going to put Duran Duran into the category of bands that flourished principally because of video, it's hard not to condemn them for the sins of the network, years later. It's hard not to see them as more Britney than Bow Wow Wow. It's not a fair knock, this guilt by MTV-association. But it's a knock that sticks.

Watch the videos. See if they don't deserve more credit than they get — and then see if you don't flinch at the prospect of personally extending them that credit. That's about where I am on Duran Duran.

MITHRIDATES
I have Duran^2 Rio on vinyl. That's right, English major, "Duran Duran" is not "Double Duran", it's "Duran Squared". Didn't they teach you any math in public school?

But to the point. Without the video, "Hungry Like the Wolf" is hands down the superior song. It's no contest at all. The moaning at the end is priceless.

And VH1 is internally inconsistent on the matter. On their 100 Greatest Videos list, Hungry Like the Wolf comes in at #31; Rio at #60. So score a point for Big Sister.

Gotta love these guys, though. From the Hungry Like the Wolf Wikipedia article:

According to the band, the Burger King company has repeatedly asked to use the song in its advertising since the year it came out, but Duran Duran has consistently refused.

PHUTATORIUS
Yes — I'd like to see VH1 pull itself together and show some consistency here. Their All-Time Top Ten "80s videos" episode included Hungry like the Wolf, which came in at #3 in the Duran Duran-only episode an hour earlier. By rights there should have been two other Duran Duran videos in the Top Ten. They need someone like Deloitte & Touche to certify these rankings.

I always thought Pizza Hut should have paid off Depeche Mode for the rights to lay down a "Your own . . . personal . . . pizza" vocal over "Personal Jesus." Never happened, though — and I can't imagine it was a question of "selling out." Think of all the heroin David Gahan could have bought with that money.